Very Bad Wizards

Very Bad Wizards is a podcast about moral philosophy, moral psychology, & four-letter words. It is a collaboration between Tamler Sommers, a philosopher at the University of Houston, and David Pizarro, a psychologist at Cornell University. For more details visit: VeryBadWizards.com (Site maintained by @WelchMatthew)

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Do you think dogs make proto-moral judgments based on the actions of others? How do you think dogs would act when put through the moral psychology experiments Paul Bloom describes in his book Just Babies?

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"I have long entertained a suspicion, with regard to the decisions of philosophers upon all subjects, and found in myself a greater inclination to dispute, than assent to their conclusions. There is one mistake, to which they seem liable, almost without exception; they confine too much their principles, and make no account of that vast variety, which nature has so much affected in all her operations. When a philosopher has once laid hold of a favourite principle, which perhaps accounts for many natural effects, he extends the same principle over the whole creation, and reduces to it every phænomenon, though by the most violent and absurd reasoning. Our own mind being narrow and contracted, we cannot extend our conception to the variety and extent of nature; but imagine, that she is as much bounded in her operations, as we are in our speculation." --David Hume, "The Skeptic"

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"Unfortunately, your review of my book doesn’t offer many reasons for optimism. It is a strange document—avuncular in places, but more generally sneering. I think it fair to say that one could watch an entire season of Downton Abbey on Ritalin and not detect a finer note of condescension than you manage for twenty pages running."

—Sam Harris, “The Marionette’s Lament: A Response to Dan Dennett”

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Daniel Dennett on Sam Harris’ book Free Will:

It is also valuable…as a veritable museum of mistakes, none of them new and all of them seductive—alluring enough to lull the critical faculties of…brilliant thinkers who do not make a profession of thinking about free will. And, to be sure, these mistakes have also been made, sometimes for centuries, by philosophers themselves. But I think we have made some progress in philosophy of late, and Harris and others need to do their homework if they want to engage with the best thought on the topic.

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“How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives. Mystics and contemplatives have made this claim for ages—but a growing body of scientific research now bears it out.”

― Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

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“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.” ― Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals

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"'Know thyself' is a flimsy bargain-basement platitude, endlessly recycled but maddeningly empty. It skates the very existential question it pretends to address, the question that obsesses us: what is it to know oneself? The lesson of the identity detector is this: when we dig deep, beneath our memory traces and career ambitions and favourite authors and small talk, we find a constellation of moral capacities. This is what we should cultivate and burnish, if we want people to know who we really are."

Nina Strohminger, "The Self is Moral"

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“We are like chameleons, we take our hue and the color of our moral character, from those who are around us.”

—John Locke

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“To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.” ―Peter Singer, Animal Liberation

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“It’s important to understand that while honor is an entitlement to respect—and shame comes when you lose that title—a person of honor cares first of all not about being respected but about being worthy of respect.”

― Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen

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"…blood alcohol concentrations were found to positively correlate with utilitarian preferences…"

—Aaron Duke and Laurent Begun, “The drunk utilitarian: Blood alcohol concentration predicts utilitarian responses in moral dilemmas”

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"Honor is intrinsically conservative in the limited sense that it always seeks to conserve the principles that guide it. But the conserving character of honor in this respect should not be confused with political conservatism. By conserving the ideal of natural rights, the first Americans brought about a political revolution and then revolutionized the very nature of republican politics."

—Sharon Krause, Liberalism With Honor

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 “It is not always better to be morally better.”

                                    --Susan Wolf, "Moral Saints"

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"Suppose there was an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Super-duper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life experiences? […] Of course, while in the tank you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think that it’s all actually happening […] Would you plug in?”

— Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, Utopia

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"…fashionable outfits are those that are moderately matched, not those that are ultra-matched (“matchy-matchy”) or zero-matched (“clashing”). This balance of extremes supports a broader hypothesis regarding aesthetic preferences–the Goldilocks principle–that seeks to balance simplicity and complexity."

—Kurt Gray, Peter Schmitt, Nina Strohminger, and Karim S. Kassam, “The Science of Style: In Fashion, Colors Should Match Only Moderately”

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What accounts for the vast gender disparities in certain occupations? Is it mostly the result of pervasive gender bias, or merely distinct gender preferences?  Which explanation has the most persuasive evidence to support its claim?

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Adam Smith on the feelings we experience when a loved one is murdered:

“Resentment would prompt us to desire, not only that he should be punished, but that he should be punished by our means, and upon account of that particular injury which he had done to us. Resentment cannot be fully gratified, unless the offender is not only made to grieve in his turn, but to grieve for that particular wrong which we have suffered from him.”